Posts Tagged ‘Bohemia’

Something about today’s sunny countenance has left me longing to spend some time in DayZ‘s threat-filled bleakness. I have an almost overwhelming need to get back there and indulge in tension and horror. I’ll wait for the standalone, though, as it sounds like something from another planet, or a parallel world where dream-games are forged.

I’ve been playing the Arma 3 alpha! I know. But before we get to that, let’s see what project lead Joris-Jan van ‘t Land has to say about the state of the project, and the plans for this early release of the madly anticipated sandbox soldier sim. Read on for victory!Read the rest of this entry »

“Matt, if you maybe take your clothes off over here,” is something Rocket says in this devblog, which perhaps suggests something of the flavour of the piece. The DayZ devs have rolled out a dev video with a fairly lighthearted overview of the work they’ve been doing to get the standalone version of the game out. The environmental details are interesting – no more just searching for piles of loot, you’ll actually have to go and look for stuff in the buildings, and they can even be hidden behind other objects, meaning you’ll have to search. Anyway, go watch below, it’s got some interesting reveals.Read the rest of this entry »

Hey tiny ArmA soldier man who’s tiny now, something’s different about you. Something tremendous, but in a comparatively puny package. But what– sorry, WHAT COULD IT BE. Oh, wait, you’re the one who should be shouting to compensate for your newly diminutive stature? Not me? Right, I always get that mixed up. Anyway, I guess I’m just going to give up on guessing now– wait! I figured it out! I’ve become a giant. Now all will cower before me and write melodious odes to my unkempt toenails. Or I suppose Bohemia could be downsizing and XCOM-ifying ArmA’s brand of modern military simulation for Nvidia’s Project Shield gizmo, but no, that’d just be crazy.

Arma 3‘s release has been postponed and made rather vague, with the release window now being a wide-open “2013.” With reference to the arrested Arma 3 developers, the new project lead, Joris-Jan van ‘t Land, said:

“We’ve been in the process of implementing changes that will help us innovate as a studio under unexpected circumstances – facing problems we simply couldn’t have imagined… We’re still trying to make sense of the situation and hope that our colleagues will be released soon. Although their plight has certainly affected us on a personal level, we continue working on the tasks identified as key to the release of Arma 3.”

Bohemia also reconfirmed that they are still working on standalone DayZ, and say that a more detailed Arma 3 announcement is coming in the new year. So we’ll look forward to that. Fingers crossed for Martin and Ivan, too.

As promised in the discussions of how the mod would develop in tandem with the standalone game, Day Z‘s mod version has been patched to 1.7.3 with contributions from the wider community (as opposed to just the original dev team.) Discussing the patch on the Day Z forums, Rocket posts a list of everyone who has contributed to the latest update, and encourages others to get involved: “There is much being done, new features and content. Official support is also being made available to community development team members for some requests, where possible.”

There are no new features in this patch, sadly, as it’s all bug fixes and tweaks, and although dogs are “in” they’re no workable yet due to some missing features. Dogs, it seems, will have their day(z).

It’s been a little while since I’d caught up with the rolling experiment that is Dean Hall and the Day Z project, so it was interesting to watch the Eurogamer Expo talk given by him, which I have posted below. In it it talks about “authenticity, tension, and freedom” as the main guiding concepts for their work, but he says that he intends for a lot of what they do to be quite radical, and admits that he’s not sure how that will work out. Survival and “medical” aspects of the game will be coming under a lot of scrutiny, creating greater depth for that “silent antagonist” part of the game. The groaning, brain-eating antagonists will be getting a revamp, as he discusses. Go watch.Read the rest of this entry »

Update: We’ve just had it confirmed from Bohemia that the pair have been accused of “espionage”, and according to Greek investigators, “they had in their possession materials that may endanger the national security of Greece.”

Original: It seems that much has been invented when it comes to the news about Bohemia‘s employees arrested in Limnos, Greece. For one, the studio is saying the two were absolutely not in the country researching the game. In a statement intended to clear up a lot of the miscommunication that abounds, the Czech developers of the ArmA series make it abundantly clear that the arrested pair were only in the country as tourists.

I was just having a lovely chat with Dean Hall and Marek Spanel over at the BIS stand at GamesCom, and a couple of things emerged that I thought were interesting. Firstly, the Day Z standalone, which Hall anticipates arriving before the end of the year, could eventually have “instanced” building. Hall described how he saw the future of player-driven construction in the game consisting in underground bases that would be instanced from portals (“a grate in the ground”) across Chernarus. He described how players could dig it out, concrete it, building hydroponics, or even see it collapse on them. The second thing that was interesting is that Chernarus is being redone (“Chernarus Plus”) for the release with more enterable buildings, more detail, and even entirely new areas. New maps for the game will, apparently, be a major part of the plan for the standalone in the future.

Arma III is still quite some way off, with a release date of “2013”, but Bohemia are starting to reveal more and more of the latest iteration in their ongoing soldier sim project, giving us some tantalising glimpses of an overhauled engine and a reworked game. Creative directors Ivan Buchta and Jay Crowe took some time out from working on their near-future weaponry simulations to tell us about their plans for the game, the meaning of the near-future setting, the impact of Day Z, and the value of modding.Read the rest of this entry »

“The civil war in Bystrica is at its end. But it’s not the end of fear for the people. War criminals like Colonel Miyovic still terrorize the country with their militia looting and murdering civilians. Forces of the Czech Republic Army are sent to restore order.” Go Czech army! Also this: “15 new missions in the singleplayer campaign, scenarios and procedural template gameplay modes” and “two new summer-season terrains: Bystrica and Bukovina.” One of those is the lovely green environment pictured above. £8 pre-order pricetag on this, it’s turning up in Q3 of this year. One for a, uh, limited audience, perhaps.

The expanding popularity of an Arma 2 mod, Day Z, might have surprised all of us, but imagine the surprise felt by the chap who created it, Dean “Rocket” Hall. There are nearly 48,000 characters now registered in the game’s stats, when he imagined there’d be just a few hundred. His motivation to make the ultra-bleak multiplayer zombie survival mod might not surprise any of you, though, when you read his take on what games should be, and why the kinds of stories experiences like Day Z produce are so important. There were a couple of times in this interview where I hooted in agreement with what Rocket had to say. See if you can spot them.Read the rest of this entry »